I have a hard and fast rule for myself when it comes to my Dev News Weekly and Colorado Tech Weekly posts: There will be 10 stories, no more, no less. 10 shall be the number of stories, and the number of stories shall be 10. 11 stories there shall not be, neither should there be 9, excepting that when there is one more to make 10.

This week was especially difficult to narrow all the stories down to 10. No wonder so many people narrow their blogs down to specific languages and frameworks. It’s a little mind-blowing to keep track of it all. I eventually ended up getting frustrated and picking stories that had the word “developer” in the headline. Speaking of frustrating, I realized that I haven’t written any code since I started this news letter. I see little green squares in my near future…and Monty Python.

Developer News

We don’t need new image formats: Mozilla works to build a better JPEG [ArsTechnica]

Pick of the Week

I needed to have something else in these posts besides my usual blathering and 10 news stories, so I will choose one thing each week to promote just because I like it.

The Application Developers Alliance is one of the first good, general sources I found for development. It is “a non-profit global membership organization that supports developers as creators, innovators, and entrepreneurs.” It’s geared a little more towards the developer as a business person crowd so if you wonder about ROI as much as you wonder about TDD, then this could be a good group for you.

Thank you for reading!

If you know of any other good news sources for developers (especially newbies like me), please let me know!

Satya Nadella laid out his vision for Microsoft this week. I like “productivity and platform” over “software and services”. “Software and services” sounds like “stuff and junk” just without the cool alliteration. Apple showed transparency with Swift. Amazon showed off some new AWS services and Google released a cross-platform SDK! I feel like I’m cheating at SEO but this all really did happen this week.

Developer News

Apple opens up with a new blog about Swift, its new programming language [TechCrunch]

Python is now the most popular introductory teaching language at top U.S. universities [ACM]

Amazon courts mobile devs with a new suite of AWS services [VentureBeat]

Google Updates Android’s Play Games and Cross-Platform SDKs [ProgrammableWeb]

New Raspberry Pi “B+” uses less power, has more USB ports [ArsTechnica]

Pick of the Week

I needed to have something else in these posts besides my usual blathering and 10 news stories, so I will choose one thing each week to promote just because I like it.

My last 2 picks have been podcasts so I felt the need to change it up. This week my pick is codecademy.com. For too long I said “I want to be a developer” without having an answer to the question “What kind of developer?” Codecademy allowed me to try out a language without too much overhead, actually without any overhead! It’s all on their site. If you want to check out a new web programming language, give them a visit!

Thank you for reading!

If you know of any other good news sources for developers (especially newbies like me), please let me know!

Did you notice my typo in my headline? I bet you did. It was on purpose, I promise. This week, Google told us that the top reason code doesn’t compile is typos. Telling programmers that typos cause the most errors is like telling us that water is wet or the sun is bright. But I guess with having it proven, it’s nice to know I’m not alone. Speaking of proving things, how do you prove that water is wet anyway?

Developer News

Amazon launches its most affordable EC2 instances yet, but there’s a caveat [TechCrunch]

“HummingBoard” looks like a Raspberry Pi but packs in more power [ArsTechnica]

Pick of the Week

I needed to have something else in these posts besides my usual blathering and 10 news stories, so I will choose one thing each week to promote just because I like it.

Another one of my favorite podcasts is Coder Radio. It’s a weekly podcast recorded every Monday. Coder Radio is hosted by IT guy turned podcaster, Chris Fisher and co-hosted by independent software development president and coder, Michael Dominick so it provides a great contrast between ops and development.

It’s a more discussion-based show. They touch on the latest news, but spend more time discussing the topic of the show and spend a lot of time interacting with viewer/listener feedback. Another fun, infotainment show!

Thank you for reading!

If you know of any other good news sources for developers (especially newbies like me), please let me know!

Colorado Tech Weekly brings you the top 10 information technology stories of the past week and the best upcoming local events every Monday morning!

The biggest issue I’ve had with set top boxes is that I can’t just go online like I can with my computer or phone. That all changes this week with the tiny $35 Google ChromeCast. I have had issues with making bigger devices touch-enabled because it just seems weird to have to hold my hand out to my computer or TV. This week, the Leap Motion controller fixes that for me too. I am really looking forward to seeing more devices like these. This is the same kind of energy and innovation I am seeing in Colorado every week when I research for these posts.

Local News

Colorado is poised to take on the tech world in a big way [InnovatioNews]

A quick note about why I love Twitter

Sure some people use Twitter to tweet about their lunch or post pictures of their cats, but there is something great about this service that only allows 140 character updates and 160 character profile summaries. It takes away so many social barriers!

This week for my computer science class, we were asked to figure out why the Java GUI components are called “Swing”. I found my answer in a blog post (Why is Swing Called Swing?), but I wanted a more solid source. So I found Georges Saab’s Twitter account and asked him myself. Being the cool guy he is, he responded: